Author: despc

By Penny Craswell

Design is not just about creating products to sell and buildings to live in. Many designers are now looking past the traditional forms of design and architecture, and exploring design’s potential to positively impact the world in other ways. This includes how design can help rebuild habitats for bees and other pollinating insects whose natural homes have been destroyed or degraded by humans.

In The Netherlands, Matilde Boelhouwer has turned her research and design skills to reversing the drastic decline in insect population in urban environments. As part of her project Insectology: Food for Buzz, she collaborated with university researchers, scientists and engineers to design five different artificial flowers that can be installed in any urban environment to provide an emergency food source for bees and other insects.

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By Penny Craswell

This house in Melbourne’s Brighton East features a new extension with a distinctive roof that architects Wowowa describe as a colonnade. It also has a colourful new interior with a kitchen in chocolate brown, yellow, pink and multi-coloured terrazzo, and bathrooms in green and blue.

The architects have added four bedrooms and two bathrooms, extra living spaces, storage, and increased connection to the exteriors in one fell swoop with the colonnade – a new section of the building connected by a row of columns. “The hardworking colonnade is the innovation in this design,” the architect’s statement says.

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By Penny Craswell

Featuring a number of bespoke details, this new modern Mexican restaurant in Sydney’s Freshwater was designed by local interior design studio Five Foot One.

Called St Alma in reference to its ‘big sister’ restaurant Alma in nearby Avalon, the restaurant has a large open dining room with banquette seating on one side and booths on the other, a gorgeous burgundy bar and a semi-enclosed kitchen with open windows.

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By Penny Craswell

Designed and made by London-based design brand Pinch, the Brody wingback armchair has a streamlined form that is inspired by the classic wingback armchair style.

The wingback armchair dates back the 1600s England when the wing shape of the seat and arms provided an extra buffer from cool breezes in draughty houses and cottages.

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This year, designer and curator Dale Hardiman is part of four separate events as part of Melbourne Design Week. I interviewed him to find out more.

Penny Craswell: Hi Dale, you are a designer but you also put together a lot of exhibitions. Why is that?

Dale Hardiman: I initially began organising group exhibitions as I thought there was a huge gap in the Australian design field. When I was 23 back in 2013, the only outlets for contemporary design that didn’t sit within the commercial field were ones organised by creatives who would self-initiate exhibitions, and they would need to work incredibly hard for an audience (I know this as I organised my first solo exhibition in 2012).

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By Penny Craswell

Indre is a new lighting design by Nikolai Kotlarczyk for Rakumba, a double-wall capsule in mouth-blown technical glass that is suspended with an interlinking metal rod.

Australian designer Kotlarczyk was inspired by his adopted home in Copenhagen when creating the design of Indre, in particular the suspended catenary streetlights of the old city centre. Indre by means city centre in Danish.

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By Penny Craswell

A new Italian coffee shop in Sydney has interiors by Alexander &Co that make the most of the industrial character of the building with the addition of bespoke design, retro furnishings, and recycled and recyclable materials.

The Genovese Coffee House began when Alfio Genovese opened his first coffee shop in Lygon Street, Melbourne in 1970. Now, third-generation family member Adam Genovese has opened the brand’s first Sydney location and is keeping the tradition alive with a space dedicated to Italian coffee.

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By Penny Craswell

This home by Melbourne-based Wolveridge Architects creates a sense of calm thanks to a materials palette of neutral colours and natural textures. Located in Victoria near the beach, the house is built on a bowl-shape site, with the layout arranged around a set of courtyards, hence its name, Courtyard Residence. Floor-to-ceiling windows to each of the courtyards are dressed in semi-transparent curtains that billow in the breeze.

Lending architectural gravitas to the house is a rammed earth spine wall that extends through the building, broken like a perforated line and acting as both external wall at the entry and internal wall adjacent to the living room and kitchen.

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By Penny Craswell

Now showing at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Clay Dynasty is an extensive exhibition featuring a range of studio ceramic works in Australia from the last 50 years. The exhibition charts the work of Australian ceramicists over three generations and includes over 400 works from 160 Australian artists. Displayed across one vast exhibition floor, it’s an impressive project that appeals both to the old school of Australian ceramics while also offering a fascinating glimpse into ceramics as contemporary art today.

The exhibition explores three key themes: 1) Function and Beauty, 2) Form and Image and 3) Funk and Postmodern Ceramics. “The museum is revitalising its approach to ceramics and other traditional craft areas,” says Curator Eva Czernis-Ryl. “We are trying to show this incredible potential that clay has as a medium of artistic expression.”

I was most excited to see the contemporary works, which include over 70 individual objects acquired and commissioned by the Museum. This review will focus on a selection of these.

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This essay was originally commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria for publication in NGV Magazine, Issue #30, Sep-Oct 2021. ‘Designing the Unknown: Symbols and objects of death, remembrance and mourning in design and making’ was written by Penny Craswell.

We might not think of designers as being concerned with existential subjects such as mortality, but if we take a closer look at symbols and objects of death, remembrance and mourning throughout history, a different story emerges. Looking at design works in the NGV Collection as well as common symbols, from the Jolly Roger to the ‘spiky blob’ of COVID-19, Penny Craswell explores how designers confront the big questions of life and death, and how they can influence our perceptions and attitudes towards the unknown.

‘Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.’ — HARUKI MURAKAMI

I was about ten years old when I saw my first death mask. Ned Kelly’s face seemed almost serene – eyes closed, head smooth, propped up in a glass display case at the Old Melbourne Gaol. The memory of that moment has stayed with me all these years – standing there I had a powerful sense of fascination mixed with fear. This was not some horror movie or bogeyman – this was a real man, a real corpse. And his life was really taken, here, at these gallows.

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